What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes

With that sentence, written by the journalist Samantha Cole for the tech site Motherboard in December, 2017, a queasy new chapter in our cultural history opened. A programmer calling himself "deepfakes" told Cole that he'd used artificial intelligence to insert Gadot's face into a pornographic video. And he'd made others: clips altered to feature Aubrey Plaza, Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift. Porn, as a Times headline once proclaimed, is the "low-slung engine of progress." It can be credited with the rapid spread of VCRs, cable, and the Internet--and with several important Web technologies.